30th June CASTELO BRANCO

I’ve picked courgettes every day for the last week, we have four plants and they’re very productive; we had two days away from the quinta and we had huge marrows 

"Courgettes"

Brett reckons if you videoed them for 24 hours you could practically see them growing. We’ve been eating ratatouille, fried courgettes, courgette fritters and still have loads of courgettes left so there’s no way we could eat the marrows too – but I couldn’t throw them away (we wouldn’t have this problem if we had pigs). So we left them on the wall of one of the fontes (public drinking water, some Portuguese don’t have water at their quinta and have to collect it from the local fonte), they were gone a few hours later.

Brett continued digging out a walkway at the back of the house,

This was dug out at about 2' deep

while I sowed vegetable seeds, it felt good to start our vegetable garden and the area is starting to look better too, we’re gradually getting rid of Mr Luis’s mess and contraptions; like his supports for vines – made from rotten wooden poles repaired with metal poles and baler twine. We’ve replaced them with wooden poles held together with nails.

We went out for a meal in the evening with Mark and Glen (same place we went before); I put makeup on for the first time in about three months, it felt strange. The meal was very cheap again, 10€ a head including beer and wine.